Abstract [en]

Online stores are becoming a natural part of our daily life, and more and more services and products are purchased through an online store. As e-commerce is growing, so is computer fraud, and trustworthiness is now an important topic in e-commerce. Exploring what components in an e-commerce experience, from a customer's point of view, that affect trust is therefore important. The web page can be equated to the look of a physical store, but a company needs to have other trust indicating elements in an online store since a consumer cannot touch the product or have an eye to eye dialog with the salesman. So, the question is How do you display things in an online store to appeal trust in the first impression of the shop and what other graphical factors matterswhen you want to appeal trust? Our definition of trust is taken from McKnight and Chervany and is defined as "the extent to which one party is willing to depend on the other party in a given situation with a feeling of relative security, even though negative consequences are possible". We also build our study on how different colors get people to react in a certain way and the importance of the first impression. To answer the question about how to appeal trust in an online shop, we sent out a form to students at KTH Royal Institute of Technology containing 31 images of online stores and asked them to answer the question "Does this web shop seem trustworthy to you?" on each of these images. When creating the various images with different designs we wanted to include designs that we thought were going to be perceived as trustworthy, and designs that we thought not. We could then change some aspects in those designs to see what works or not. The result shows that online stores that are deemed professional is the most trustworthy ones and we can conclude that intense colors are something to avoid, while having a certificate and providing contact information is something to recommend.